AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX Benchmarks and Review

The AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX is a massive workstation processor by most metrics. We covered the second-generation launch and ever since it has been one of the most intriguing chips on the market. Let us be clear, this is a case where not just the performance should be measured, but also the cachet of these chips. At this end of the workstation spectrum, processors need to deliver excellent performance. Buyers of these systems are often professional creative organizations that need their employees to have excellent performance, but they need something more. They use high-end hardware as either a lure or an employee retention mechanism. In 2018, giving an employee the highest core count (32) single socket workstation on the market makes a strong statement that a company is investing in that employee to give them the best technology.

Key stats for theAMD Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX: 32 cores / 64 threads with 64MB L3 cache. Base clock is 3.0GHz while the Turbo clock is 4.2GHz. Clocks are unlocked, so if you are willing to pay the power, there is more room to go. The CPU features a 250W TDP. This is a $1799 price point which is fairly low on the overall spectrum of CPUs these days. Here is the AMD page with the feature set.

Here is what the lscpu output looks like for the chips:

AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX Lscpu

Test Configuration

We had the opportunity to test the AMD Threadripper 2990WX in a BOXX APEX T3 system. We are going to have a review of the system soon, but it is the right kind of platform for this test as it is the kind of platform an employer will buy to put on the desk of their best creative professionals.

We are going to discuss this platform more in or formal review of the platform. It is exceedingly exciting. BOXX managed to fit 32 cores, eight DIMMs, a big GPU, and water cooling in a relatively compact package. By assuming water cooling from the start, the company moved the power supply to above the CPU socket making the system considerably more compact. Instead of a massive workstation, this is something that can fit under or on an office desk.

Inside The BOXX APEXX T3 Workstation

While this is not the most conventional internal layout, BOXX’s design team did a great job maximizing functionality while minimizing footprint with the APEXX T3 series. We are going to have our full BOXX APEXX T3 series review, including power consumption of this configuration soon.

As configured, this is a $10,000 list price system which thoroughly puts it in the higher-end of workstations, and there is plenty of room to go higher with more GPUs or storage.

A Quick Note on the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX Architecture

The AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX is something different in the world of professional workstation processors for more than just core count. Here the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX utilizes four die, like on AMD EPYC. Instead of each of the four NUMA nodes attaching to its own memory, two of the 8-core NUMA nodes are not directly attached to RAM or PCIe. They are compute chips enabled via Infinity Fabric.

As you can see, NUMA nodes 0 and 2 both have RAM and PCIe devices attached. NUMA nodes 1 and 3 are simply compute nodes. This is not something we would expect to scale to the next generation. Instead, we see this as the way AMD was able to bring this part to market. In our benchmarks we are going to show a few cases where even though the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX has great performance, this topology meant it was not as good as it could have been.

AMD Ryzen Threadripper Gen2 Zen Plus

Beyond the new topology, the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX also gets Zen+ which is the improved version of AMD’s Zen microarchitecture. That helps with some of the on chip latency, and yields an IPC improvement over current generations. Of course, this pales in comparison to the fact that AMD is delivering 50% more cores than the previous generation Threadripper 1950X flagship.

Patrick has been running STH since 2009 and covers a wide variety of SME, SMB, and SOHO IT topics. Patrick is a consultant in the technology industry and has worked with numerous large hardware and storage vendors in the Silicon Valley. The goal of STH is simply to help users find some information about server, storage and networking, building blocks. If you have any helpful information please feel free to post on the forums.

I’d bet your build performs better because the Boxx system comes with ECC memory, the fastest of which is 2667/CL19. They’re trading off absolute performance for stability, which many workstation users require.

There is no mention of ECC memory on the Boxx website nor on STH so I wouldn’t know.
What I do know from the boxx website is that they charge a lot of money for the used components $ 2,582 for 96 GByte of memory, that is almost $27 per GigaByte, where ECC-UDIMM DDR4-2667 CL19 cost less than half per GigaByte.

Great stuff !
One question: unlike Epyc, Threaripper 2990X has direct access to memory for only 2 cores among the four zen cores. Is the linux release you’re using is optimized to automatically fork processes if asked by user applications that are memory hungry on the relevant cores (those with directe acces to memory) ?
I’ve read elsewhere that microsoft is going to supply a patch to handle this kind of situation.